Laptop Search Begins – Gigabyte

To understand what is going on with all the laptop information, please go back to this post where I speak all about it here.

My current gaming laptop is a Gigabyte, so it made sense (to me at least) to start looking there for my Ultrabook purchase. I bopped over to their site, and what do I see under products?

They even have an Ultrabook category! I was excited. So, I started to peruse further. The Ultrabook series for Gigabyte is called AERO. They have a ton of different options. I am opting to look at the 14-inch models because as I said in my previous entry, I am looking for something slightly smaller. The model I am looking at specifically is AERO 14 (GTX 1050 Ti).

Right off the bat, the first thing I am noticing when it comes to these specs is that it feels as if these are gaming specs. I’ve not been in the room with many Ultrabooks that could take on gaming, but these are looking as if they might be able to. They have the SSD that I am looking for, storage is 512GB, comes with Windows 10 Home. It has a 14-inch display. I have no perception of measurement in my head, so I busted out a tape measure and measured my display on my work laptop. From corner to corner it is about 15 inches or so (always remember that displays are measured diagonally) and my work laptop is a full-size laptop. The laptop is gorgeous and comes in three different colors.

However, I have a history of seeing something pretty in technology and blindly purchasing and dooming myself. See: My HP Garden Dreams laptop purchase from back in the day.

In other interesting facts, it is only 4 lbs, 1.9cm slim (whatever that means), the charging adapter is light, and has an additional USB charging port on it, so you can charge additional equipment. It has an intel core i7 processor. It has something called Thunderbolt 3 port technology which I had to look up. Thunderbolt is the hardware interface for ports. Thunderbolt 3 is the newest and has USB- C. I can go further in depth, but all you really need to know is that it seems like most of the USB ports on this laptop are USB- C. It also one of the things that allows this Ultrabook the ability to Output its display at 4K on 3 external displays. It allows you to tweak the fans, which I think is kind of awesome. It goes quiet, normal, gaming, or you can customize it. If you are a game streamer, it lets you adjust the background of your streaming without a green screen.
All of these things sound amazing. It is a gorgeous laptop. I have spent hours on the site looking at it. But does it meet the qualifications that I need? Let’s see:
1. It must be small. No full sized laptops This is a little smaller than my work laptop, which leads me to think it is a full size laptop. I think it gets away with being called an ultrabook because it is so light.
2. No HP Laptops. √
3. No Lenovo laptops√
4. I need a solid state hard drive√
5. No less than 128GB of drive space√
6. I would prefer a Windows machine, but would do Linux if everything else was there√
7. My price point is $500 dollars. So we need to talk about this one for a minute. Gigabyte only sells refurbished items on their website, so I had to Google to see a price. That is when it became clearly evident that this was an Ultrabook in weight only (UIWO?). This is a gaming laptop, and as such it has a gaming laptop price. It is about 1100 dollars over my budget. I may be able to fudge my numbers a bit and get a little more money for the right laptop, but I cannot fudge 1100 for a laptop that has a lot of bells and whistles that I do not need. No matter how pretty it may be.

So there you have it. Gigabyte has amazing laptops. I know, I own one, I’ve had it for a good little while and the product is good. It stands up over time. I’m able to play my games on it and have not seen a degradation of the quality. While I would love for my newest laptop to be with them, and they met a lot of what I need, they did not meet the two most important factors. So, the hunt is still on. As always, if you have any notebooks you want to recommend, or any thoughts on laptops in general, feel free to reach out. Leslie@geekygirlguide.com

Update: I was back on Gigabyte’s website when I noticed something:

They have an Ultrabook series, but if you look a little bit lower, they have a mainstream series. I clicked over to there:

And what do we have here?

Gigabyte does have some smaller less powerful computers! Let’s check it out.
*Starts Reading*
*Tries to find a price*
*Reads how old these are*
*Throws everything away*
So, after doing some reading, these laptops are from 4 years ago. Why are they still on your site Gigabyte!? We will not be diving in to the other laptops. My original opinion still stands. Gigabyte is too powerful and too expensive for what I need it to do.
On to the Next one!